2K: Bioshock 2 Dates, Mafia 2 Delay

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So Take 2 Interactive (2K Games) finally got around to discussing their end of financial year stuff, and as well as a load of money stuff being discussed, more relevant news about release dates emerged. Bioshock 2 will hit on October 30th in Europe, and November 3rd in the US. It also has a new teaser site. Woo. Mafia II meanwhile has been delayed until at least October 31st, and could be any time between then and April 30th 2010. Borderlands is still scheduled for a “fourth quarter” release, and Max Payne 3 is due in Winter 2009.

Pity, I get the feeling that it’s going to suffer for that. I’m not really all that interested in Bioshock 2, but if Mafia 2 is something I’ve been looking forward to for a while. Everyone’s always putting games out for the season and they usually end up against incredibly stiff competition. If Mafia 2 were a more established and familiar franchise then I could see it having more of a chance, but the series has been away for a decade, and IIRC the first game only sold moderate numbers.

I wonder if the cheesy Brooklyn / Irish cop voices are still going to be there.

Looking at the Arma2 dates, it doesn’t seem to be coming out in the US at all…

Thats because getting titles into retail here in the US is now a non-starter. The retailers only want either console titles or PC games which have major console counterparts.

It doesn’t help that you only have a handful (Best Buy, Target, Walmart, EB Games) left and the only ones doing large numbers. Since they both now have some really, truly crazy requirements. e.g. one of those now wants a “per store” placement fee upfront. This means that if they have 500 stores and you want your game in all of them, you have to pay a fee for *each* store that it is going into. Do the math.

Plus there’s no money to be made in PC games at retail anymore due to how the deals are now structured. On a $39.99 game, you’d be hard pressed to see the brighter side of $8.50 per unit when the dust settles. And thats being generous.

If 505 Games can’t get even a distribution deal together, thats because they have no takers because even the distributors have to be picky because they can’t take a title that retailers aren’t going to pick up.

Then you have to deal with payment structures. Most distributors don’t even pay their bills. And when they do, you’re looking at something along the lines of Net 90 and some cases upwards of Net 120 to see a dime. Oh yeah, no advances either.

So unless you’re from one of the big publishers that has a console version tie-in or you have a heavily marketed title in a popular genre, good luck getting that into retail. Even companies like Stardock which only do PC games, have to go through a distributor (they use Take2) and even then volume potential and extensive marketing is what counts.

Given the clusterfark (see Atari) that was ArmA, I’m not in the least bit surprised that they’re having trouble getting ArmAII into retail here in the US. In Europe things are a bit different and only because online distribution hasn’t taken off over there as it has here. Plus, they have different standards which they have to abide by unless they want the EU to go Kamikaze on their collective.

In the case of ArmAII, the game is so hardcore that I doubt that anyone who is truly a hardcore gamer and a fan is goiing to care about a boxed version since for most it is going to be a Day One purchase online. Since I loathe Steam with a passion that is usually reserved for Lucifer, I’m getting it on Direct2Drive on day one.

Not 2K but still related – the PC version of Red Faction: Guerrilla will also be coming out a bit later (25th of August) than the console versions (2nd of June).. although in the case of Volition that might actually be a good thing, seeing their shoddy PC port of Saints Row 2 – supposedly this time round they’re not doing the port themselves.

Yeah, Steam sucks.Only stuff I have there is Valve’s games (which I have in retail, so having to use steam for them is pain in the ass) and few games I bought when they were on sale – Dark Messiah, FarCry, BGaE,Zeno Clash..

The bestesteverest digital model is GOG’s one, I wish everyone would switch to that.One can dream : /

Well, sometimes it just for no reason uses 100% of my cpu and I have to quit it and restart it.Or sometimes I get “download starting” message for ever without it actually starting, and I have to delete clientregistryblob and rebuild the account.Plus, I prefer not having to start third party application just to start the game – I like to run as few processess as possible, so when I wanna play something from steam, I have to wait for it to load first – annoyance.

Of course, nowadays even retail games are annoying with their timeconsuming DRM, but..at least I have physical medium.

Not to mention that I can buy retail game for 1/3 of the price that it has on steam.Fuck steam.

^To a large extent that physical copy is unfortunately becoming more and more useless in the face of web based verification systems.

As far as I can I try to buy games that don’t need that kind of online verification, but these days it seems to be becoming the standard.

I prefer GOG’s system, but these days I don’t really have any really big issues with Steam, and in a lot of ways it’s a really good system, not just for the game delivery but as a heavy duty tied in community system. I really do like the community system they’ve got in place at the moment, and it’ll be interesting to see how it expands in future.

The Steam sales are often ridiculous too, so that’s usually gets me to buy something if I’ve been eyeing it for a while but didn’t want to get it before.

Speaking only for myself, obviously: I dislike having to have a client running in order to launch and play a game; I especially dislike having to have an active internet connection in order to launch a game, and in my experience Offline mode simply doesn’t work, or at least not with any consistency and never when I’ve actually needed it (admittedly it’s been a while since I last tried it, so I don’t know whether this has improved); forced patches, of the ‘you must download this before being allowed to run the game’ sort, shit me up the wall; some of the games they sell are incompatible with mods and fan patches created for the retail version; and various little quibbles like download speeds, minor issues with their client software, etc.

That said, I haven’t HATED Steam since the end of my dialup days, and I do appreciate the need (not on my end, but for those who actually want to make money by making and selling games) for a copy protection system that actually works — I don’t go in for the whole “come on man, a DRM-free honour system is the only way to go” line of reasoning by any stretch. I just find Steam to be mildly pleasant some of the time, a mild annoyance some of the time, and an infuriating pile of wank every now and then.

Bioshock is coming out in Oct/Nov? That’s a lot earlier than I expected for some reason… good though. I enjoyed the original (even if it wasn’t quite the second coming of System Shock). Max Payne 2 is interesting as well… the first two were great, but you never know with threequels.

GoG should definitely get Max Payne if they can get their hands on it. I already have a few games through there (Gothic, Il-sturmovik, BG&E, Freespace)

I like the steam client with friends system, good server browser etc. I wish you could integrate games bought elsewhere more to Steam. Yeah I know you can add a shortcuts which opens the steam UI when you run the game.

Oh, and also, most of their prices are The Suck, not only compared to retail but also other digital distribution sites.

I’m reminded of the music industry trotting out all kinds of excuses for why they made everything so expensive: shopping, packaging, renting shelf-space etc. Then comes downloads and it is revealed to be a load of crock; with these out of the equation, the price still remains almost unchanged.

It doesn’t matter who sets the prices on Steam: all that tells me is that all publishers stink and someone should be taking them to task for it. There’s no excuse for why those games should be at the prices they are at next to the retail boxes. It especially makes no sense when Valve have demonstrated repeatedly that low prices increase sales often well-beyond the cost of the price cut.

Well done, you’ve made me furious for reasons I don’t quite understand.

@subedii
Every game will be going up against Modern Warfare 2, and it is going to win. Fortunately for video games, the market isn’t quite as fickle as motion pictures and games can become successful at any point.

As far as Steam goes, I’ve never had a problem with it and it seems like a lot of the complaints leveled at it are really more just personal preferences than actual negatives. A small client running in the background that uses .01% of my system resources is about as annoying as someone sneezing 2 cities over. I like the client, it keeps everything consolidated and I don’t need 27 icons on my desktop to play my games.

Also, as far as prices go… seriously? Steam is 3 times as expensive as retail? I didn’t know they were selling games for 150 units of value(depending on your continent of choice). Those vondrukes! I would say Steam has fantastic prices, especially if you wait for those good deals. Farcry 2 for 15, Defense Grid for 5, and other such deals. Retail is 30 bucks minimum for any game pretty much these days.

Since Blizzard’s launch code is apparently buggy, your hard drive will be eaten within an hour of doing so. Happened to me until I found where it was placing the temporary files.

Of course that was a while ago, and I don’t play warcraft anymore. However the chances of Blizzard upgrading anything is basically zero. A fix would’ve come through the Valve-Steam side.

@MD Of course if you have no Steam friends you won’t find it useful. It has an IM in it, as well as a web browser. And the end of your dial up days were… recently? Honestly Steam isn’t gonna matter so much if you’re trying to play any somewhat modern multiplayer game on dial up. Because it doesn’t happen.

@Black Mamba: They release them at the end of the year because that’s just the best time to do so. Especially since a month or so later they have non-denominational commercial holidays to spend their money on for themselves or for the gamer they know.

@nakke: What? Their prices are bad? Compared to what? I’m not sure but I think that they only negotiate prices. I mean a lot of people I know were turned off from Killing Floor because it wasn’t 10 bucks (not even counting the multiple gameplay issues in the reviews here)

It’s got a web browser? Why did nobody say so? I’ve always wanted one of those!
P.S. I like Steam.
P.P.S. but then I usually wait for the sales before buying. Also it won’t run on my spare PC. And they sell old games that turn out not to run on Vista. Boo!
P.P.P.S it’s better now that it doesn’t tell you you suck if you haven’t played a game in the last two weeks.

@dsmart
Has anyone ever mentioned that you look kinda like Sean Connery in that picture?

More on topic though, why does the store suck in your opinion? I’ve always found it to be very easy to find what I need with very little effort. It is also really quick to go from purchase to play, no problem with that either on my end. On prices, I think it has more to do with finding the right deals at the right time using any of these services. I’ve never really found that any one of these services always has the best prices all the time. Nor have I found that any one of these services always has the worst prices.

Most people like the community aspect because it is more fun to play games with friends, not snoop on other people’s purchasing and gaming habits :)

For Borderlands’ sake I hope “fourth quarter” relates to their fiscal year (which ends in October). I’m looking forward to this one and I’d hate to see it get overlooked like Dead Space last year.

Infact, I’m secretely hoping they actually meant “Winter” so that it doesn’t get shoved out the door before it’s cooked in order to avoid the Bioshock 2/Modern Warfare 2 brouhaha.

Sounds like the game has scope, they should keep working on it til february and allow the open-world-awesome-sauce to simmer. (Unlike some other open world game due to release soon, whisperings on the wind tell me that peeps forgot to add “corners” and “handling” to a racing game).

Re steam: a 15sec delay added to game startup (with a modest PC and a slow but consistent network connection) is annoying. Also, the patching that happens automatically, blocking you from starting up until it’s finished (I don’t run the steam client all the time). Also, the botched downloading – sometimes I have to pause/unpause the downloads to work. Oh, and the browser – why oh why implement yet another browser? Is my browser not good enough? Do you want your own, enhanced set of security holes? I bet they are not as quick to update their browser’s vulnerabilities as fast as browser vendors are.

Now, I don’t know what it is, there may be a server a few blocks down or something, but I *always* get max speed on my downloads >_>

As far as pricing goes, the complaint that something costs as much on Steam as it does in a box is ludicrous. Sure, that sort of pricing makes zero sense, but to rail against something because you have to pay the *same* prices is silly.

The browser is there so that you can browse the internet with the steam overlay without tabbing, I doubt anyone would use it as their standard browser.
Steam prices are of course controlled by publishers, not steam. Thats also why the prices often are just as high as retail even though you arguably get less, publisher dont want to piss off retailers. There are very often sales too so to call the prices high is a bit ludicruos.
Server issues? Not sure what you mean here, you could mean game servers which have very little to do with steam. The only steam related “server issue” you can have for an allready installed game would be stat tracking or possibly being unable to login, which I cant remember happening to me since counter strike 1.6, so I cant see how this is really a problem.
And my download speed rarely go below 1MB/sec.

Its possible I’ve just been lucky for the last 6 years or whatever, but I have never seen any of the usually mentioned problems with steam in reality. Probably the only exception is offline mode which does suck, though I cant think of scenario where I would use it anyway.

@ Blast Hardcheese, you seem to have responded to my post without actually responding to my post, picking a couple of barely relevant points and ignoring the rest. :-[

@MD Of course if you have no Steam friends you won’t find it useful. It has an IM in it, as well as a web browser.

I have quite a few Steam friends, and I’m aware of the messaging function. When I’m playing multiplayer games and want to link up with people I know, it can be useful. (Hence the ‘mildly pleasant some of the time’ comment). When I’m playing a single-player game I usually prefer to have it off, which fortunately is an option. As for the web browser, I already have a far better one for desktop use, and have no inclination to surf the internet in the middle of a game. (Also, last time I looked it was locked down to the Steam Store, Steam Community and the like, making it a ‘web browser’ in the same sense that my pocket calculator is a ‘personal computer’. But it’s quite possible that changed long ago and I simply didn’t notice.) I didn’t complain about either of those features though, or claim that Steam was useless. All I said regarding the client was that I’m personally not a fan of it, and more importantly not a fan of being forced to use it.

And the end of your dial up days were… recently? Honestly Steam isn’t gonna matter so much if you’re trying to play any somewhat modern multiplayer game on dial up. Because it doesn’t happen.

The end of my dialup days came a few years ago, and I’m not sure why you’re picking that out for a response. The reference to dialup came with me saying “That said, I haven’t HATED Steam since the end of my dialup days,” and going on to acknowledge that Steam isn’t all bad/completely unjustified.

I never said Steam was the end of the world, I was just answering the question ‘why do people not like it?’ It’s fine that you DO like it, but if you want to argue the toss with me (which is probably fairly pointless other than to point out factual errors or features I’m unaware of, but sadly I’m always up for a pointless internet discussion/argument) then at least respond to the complaints I actually made.